The death of yellow pages
I embarked on another test with Yellow Pages 6 months back. We paid a premium to be top listed for SEO Gold Coast and the promises of success were many from the Yellow pages rep. It was against my instincts and past tests which had all yielded zero to little results, certainly no profit. The results of the test were terrible. Not only were few people even using the service, the click through rate was near zero. Consequently I cancelled the 6 month contract as soon as it came up for renewal.
Freelancer success
During the same period we have listed with Oneflare.com and the difference is dramatic. Oneflare.com actually got results, we have had some good clients from Oneflare and it has had some trickle through effect on our over all site ranking in Google. Which is great.
A shift in the classifieds market
I have been watching WOMO create a buzz in the Australian market. Then I see that Oneflare.com has bought them out. My interest is peaked, as I have noticed oneflare.com are savy website operators and have grown dramatically since we first join on a free account.
Making the move
So I signed on an for a free account with WOMO and was promptly called by a local rep. Very refreshing the guy didn’t talk promises and dreams, but based his information in fact and had a virtual money back guarantee to back it up in plain english. Consequently, we are signed up on a 30 day trial and if we get 5-7 reviews we will get an extension, easy! Good value.
Let the testing begin
How will we test the results? We have dual analytics on our website the same as all our clients sites. We can also monitor chatter about us on social media. Lastly good old fashioned recording of were incoming calls and emails found our details. Additionally, WOMO has their own analytics. I am very interested to see how this works and will make updates to the most every month about it until it succeeds or fails.
[Update] 25/03/2015
We have been diverting all customers big and small to leave reviews only in one place and share their experience with us on WOMO.com.au and we are now, I’m proud to say the top or one of the top ranked website development and hosting companies in Australia. Has our phone suddenly started ring off the hook…no. It is early days yet though.
[Update] 13/03/2015
Still really loving this WOMO thing. So much so I thought we would develop a plugin today so you can add a WOMO widget to Magento Store really easy from the admin panel.
[Update] 11/03/2015
I experienced some really frustrating difficulties getting review requests sent and confirmed this week. Also found out if you reviewer copies and paste from another review they gave you somewhere else it will be deleted.
[Update] 6/03/2015
Been going a week now. Quite easy to send request our to clients for reviews. Unfortuntely I think I did to many at once and now a bunch of them are under investigation, whatever that means. A little frustrating because if they are declined I have to repeat the process and hope the client is kind enough to play along and write another review. I don’t see any search engine goodness coming yet. I connected my facebook page…word of warning you may not want to do this if you are just starting out or get a lot of reviews as your facebook page will be drowning in individual review posts…mine now has something like 27 of them o.0
[Update] 1/11/2016
Well the Oneflare experiment ended for us on a sour note. We had a client refuse to pay their bill after signing off the project and oneflare then became involved and pretty much stated if we didn’t refund the entire project (A job fully completed and signed off by client) they would allow the client to leave a horrendously negative review. Frankly, it just didn’t feel right and we ended our relationship with Oneflare and would not recommend using them on this basis.
[Update] 11/7/2017
Well turns out this negative review was completely fake and malicious. He had attempted to add over a 190 negative reviews on many different sites over the past 18 months. We documented this activity and passed it on to Australian Cyber crime after advice from very help local police department. WOMO to their credit finally conceded and removed the negative review after we showed them that the guy was running multiple fake accounts which were positively reviewing his business and friends and negatively reviewing ours with no proof of being a client. Malicious reviews are an issue for all business owners. Thankfully Google and other review services are being more sensible with the way they treat them and new laws allow for both civil and criminal action for business owners against these people. As much as a negative review hurts when you know it is fake our advice is to focus on the positive and getting more reviews and not worrying bout them.
Upon further analysis all Oneflare jobs we completed were barely profitable, due to the competitive nature of the quoting system. We also note that had we refunded the completed job the whole venture would have been a loss.
